Last year I took leadership of a product team for the first time. One of the first exercises I led was documenting knowledge with an in-depth inventory of every idea or initiative where the company had historically invested product development time. There were five or six years worth of ideas, hypotheses, projects, and tech debt to wrap our heads around. There was also a clear pattern of revenue debt.

The patterns of revenue debt are familiar, I suspect, to many B2B product teams. In our situation, we were working with a decade of successful B2B contracts driven by an enterprise sales team. Facing situated problems, no two customers were the same and our market was broad. A repeatable and scalable SaaS model was elusive, and was the issue we were aiming o solve – or, put another way, the golden opportunity we were hoping to triangulate. 

Up to this point I had spent a couple years working with said sales team to convert strategic prospects towards ultimately repeatable models. These efforts culminated in a hypothesis which we then built. Product/market fit (PMF) was – at least theoretically – within sight. 

This is a key focus for B2B product teams. Any future growth or opportunities to scale will be dependent on the foundations that are built, and when these foundations are revenue debt it’s really hard to move from being a service shop to SaaS. As Jason Knight describes it, “Companies with weak product/market fit but healthy industry expertise and a good founder Rolodex see everyone as an opportunity. The product isn’t good enough to stand on its own, so the only way forward is to go wide and get revenue from wherever you can, no matter the lack of a good fit.” The product becomes a hodgepodge of features and capabilities that were built to address that small (but lucrative) customer base.  

Knowing PMF to be an always-moving target, after that business-model-shaking release my team quickly returned to the drawing board. We found ourselves facing a fundamental question: How do we evolve from the laundry list of niche requirements from prospective customers into forging long-term relationships that seamlessly integrate into our broader market strategy? One major part of that answer was revisiting how we went about product discovery. 

The ideals of dialogical design 

Dialogic design shares roots with Scandinavian participatory design, the latter of which has had  a major influence on modern UX design. Its principles, like human-centered design thinking, democratic values, long-term vision, are familiar. 

Where most teams fall short is the participatory element so valued in dialogic design. From a purist perspective, end-users should be involved throughout each step of the design process. This goes beyond user research and is meant to incorporate end-user feedback, ideas, and  proposals through workshops, scenarios, and even prototyping. This directly challenges the (admittedly more practical) approach employed by most product development teams. UX research invests a large amount of time into building a data set that is referenced maybe a few times before a prototype is released, or is consolidated into a persona that stands in for an end user.  

Dialogical design implies that the persona isn’t always useful or effective. Working with the ideas and perspectives of end-users directly should offer more value by fully engaging with the world of that user, with and for whom the design is being made. 

Lay the groundwork for growth

If it’s true that product teams are primarily responsible for understanding evolving customer needs, pain points, and market trends, then the B2B product manager needs a different set of tools when working with the often-limited data offered in B2B or early stage startups. 

One of my core values working in product is co-creation. Product managers are, in essence, mediators. They glue different working groups – especially development, design, marketing – around an outcome, while acting as ambassador to other stakeholders. This is a constant creative process of effective dialogue, leadership, and calculated intervention. 

The diamond in the situation of a B2B product manager is that having a small customer base makes it very easy to simply talk to them. This is where dialogue-driven approaches to discovery, derived from dialogic design, comes in. 

Product teams need to be proactive, ideally involved in forming the relationship with the customer well before they’ve signed any contract. The product voice can steer conversations away from project plans, SOWs, and promises and instead begin setting expectations of continuous collaboration. A smaller organization can fairly quickly organize around offering a customer continuity between process (the relationship formed with an enterprise sales team to account management) to product (touchpoints and interaction with the product team). The shared goal across all internal teams should be a successful client relationship that endures while enabling company growth. 

Rooting product’s role in this service design in dialogic design approaches allows customers to be co-creators while limiting revenue debt.

Outline dialogic product discovery 

For a product team looking to prioritize product discovery, it’s going to be necessary to carve out time and space for thoughtful and consistent fieldwork. While it won’t be practical to involve end-users or customers in every stage of addressing every problem, employing these methods even occasionally can benefit product managers and leaders to better advocate for customers and wider market trends.

1. Clearly state intentions.
   What do you hope to learn from doing this? Your intentions in undertaking this style of discovery should be made clear to your team. Include what questions you’ve been asking that have led you to these methods, or if this is entirely open-ended. One intention that should be consistent across any discovery process is that you’re looking to be surprised. Dialogic product discovery may indeed confirm your own hunches or ideas, but don’t go looking for it. Look to be surprised. Surprise is a spark for innovation.  
   
2. Define your fieldwork and discovery events.
   Meetings could be informal conversations, live observations of jobs to be done, structured or semi-structured interviews, surveys, diary studies, workshops, or focus groups. It might be useful to add samples of the kind of outputs you’re hoping to generate from these activities.
   
3. Set a timeline.
   Fieldwork is extensive and can quickly become time consuming. It’s important to have an idea of scope and garner support from your team by setting a loose, flexible timeline of milestones for discovery events. Your timeline should include where you intend for designers in your team to collaborate or offer feedback on your plans.
   
4. Collaborative analysis.
   It’s important to make your work visible to others in the team who could benefit from it, especially design and product marketing and possibly development leads. Facilitate an opportunity to synthesize, evaluate, and draw insights from your fieldwork with a small group or groups.
   
5. Design with end-users.
   This isn’t practical in all settings, but in a B2B setting with select customers it’s possible. The goal isn’t to retrieve a laundry list of requirements (we don’t want a hodgepodge product) but to engage in dialogue around our end-users own efforts to externalize their creative thinking and solutioning. We want to explore concepts and gain valuable inputs from their imagined ideals and hoped-for solutions. This can vary from a customer-attended design review, a focus group, scenario workshops that incorporate or elicit solutions, or sketching out a blueprint of the customer’s idea in real-time. 

All the artifacts produced by this work, derived from a loosely structured design research process, can be collected into a larger data set. As a knowledge base that accommodates the continuous negotiation required by B2B product teams, co-creation becomes a lived value in our work and becomes tangible in output. 

What is said, what is done, what is made

Startups have a really hard time saying no. Making end-users or customers present in a project as a continuous expectation isn’t a light ask, nor is this necessarily efficient. Participatory design methods, as Rachel Charlotte Smith observed in a project she facilitated in the heritage sector, can weaken the roles and power relations between professional designers or product developers. Power relations are already tricky for many B2B companies to navigate with their customers, leading to the revenue debt issue discussed earlier. 

Building a market-ready solution requires a synthesis of reactions, hunches, distractions, end-user feedback, and limitations. Effective product managers create new insights when they merge different perspectives, which stem from invitations for collaboration and dialogue. When controlled, participatory design provides a product team with future-oriented qualitative data collection that can then be triangulated with other data (what has been said, what is done, and patterns). 

Product teams are positioned to mediate exactly this. B2B product managers are positioned to steer a customer’s demands towards co-creative framing. The end opportunity or requirement is something that emerges through the collaborative process (and ultimately as a more market-ready solution) than tailored service. Because of this, I see these ideas as useful especially to product discovery as undertaken by product leaders and product managers. 

We aren’t meant to compete with design, but augment their professional process by being proactive in our market-oriented role. It’s an approach rooted firmly in product vision-building. By incorporating these methods into our process, we shouldn’t be seeking solutions or setting specifications; we should limit predefined outputs and maximize the amount of data we’re making available to our teams for collaborative analysis. 

Then, together – with the customer too – we set outcomes.